By Maria Isabel Pita © 2014
‘A cellular anthropologist is a code finder who looks for clues to spiritual and social life hidden in our molecular structures.’—Sondra Barrett
Excerpt from my dream journal, November 22, 2013:
Back on a street of the town where I confronted the black magicians, riding in a truck of some kind, when it comes to a stop next to a building I climb out of it with the decisive words, ‘I’m lucid.’ I fly over an orange metal bar, and glide along a few feet above the street. From the edge of the roof of a building to my right, a strange black-and-white creature peers out at me. It reminds me of the vultures from my previous dream except that it’s not really a bird, as there is something fish-like about it’s texture.
The expression on its ‘face’ I can only compare to a shark’s when a camera swims beneath it’s devouring down-turned mouth that looks like a frown yet more sinister because there is no real expression there at all. When I pause in midair to face the weird thing and ask, ‘What do you represent?’ it seamlessly transforms into a great falcon wearing something like a crown on its head: the ancient Egyptian god Horus. It addresses me in a man’s voice: ‘I was going to attack things of your body, but now I won’t.’ Then he adds, ‘Talk to Sondra.’
Two days later, browsing through Kindle books online, I discovered Sondra Barrett’s Secrets of Your Cells: Discovering Your Body’s Inner Intelligence. Immediately, I recognized the name given to me by the falcon in my lucid dream and bought the book. Almost as soon as I began reading, it occurred to me that I could attempt to follow a cellular blueprint when thinking about my dreaming life: the dream space, dream sharing, dream entities and even different types of dreams. I was struck by the obvious correspondences between the behavior of our cells and our selves. In this article I focus on some of the parallels between cellular biology and dream sharing, dream healing and dreams of ‘other lives.’
Like physical cells, our dreaming selves also seem to possess ‘markers’ that can be mysteriously identified. Blood can be viewed as the physical manifestation of our life-force/soul. Blood is composed of cells that receive energy/information and make use of it in their own special ways.
This information/energy is quite literally Life fashioning and maintaining a physical vehicle. When my father was dying of Leukemia, and was receiving frequent blood transfusions from multiple donors, he confessed to me that his dreams no longer felt entirely his own; he was sure he was having the dreams of other people mingled with his. His soul was no longer the only one driving his dreams.
‘The (cell) membrane holds the ability to communicate with other cells… Just as you and I can tell a friend from a stranger by observing a person‘s external facial features, our cells do the same; each cell‘s ‘face,’ on its outer surface membrane, reveals uniquely identifiable features… identification codes or passwords that mark ‘me’ or self. These protein ‘signatures’ on the cell membrane, akin to distinctive bar codes, reveal the cell‘s identity. These ‘me’ markers also identify the cells as coming from you, a unique individual.’ – Sondra Barrett
I believe that like the trillions of cells in a single body, in dreams our individual minds—part of one life/awareness/ consciousness—are surrounded by other dreaming minds, other soul-selves we may or may not be receptive to. If we are lucidly intending to find another dreamer, whether we succeed in penetrating each others mind membrane depends on many factors. To receive a blood transfusion, people need a donor with their same blood type. Who is to say there aren’t soul types as well?
It would seriously hurt someone to receive an infusion of the wrong type of blood, and I think something similar might happen with souls in the dream space who, for some reason or another, are incompatible with each other. And perhaps some dreamers are akin to the blood type ‘O’ which is compatible with all other blood types, which makes it easier for them to dream share with others.
If two or more lucid dreamers are in mysterious resonance with each other (a cellular lock and key effect) they can metaphorically grasp each others hands just as cells do. Parts of each other (pieces of each other’s consciousness) then merge in a joint dream space where they both experience similar or common elements.
‘The basic job of our immune cells is to recognize ‘self’ and ‘other’ while collaborating with brain, gut, thoughts, beliefs, and hormones… the patterns or shapes of the two cells‘ markers fit together like a lock and key. The nature of the fit tells the cell whether what it has brushed up against is safe or not.’ – Sondra Barrett
In a lucid dream in which my former dream partner James first tried to find me, a dream entity led him to my home where he discovered a barrier all around the house in the form of a dog fence. When he knocked on the door my mother (who does not live with me in waking reality) answered the door, another protective barrier.
Like our cells, our dreaming mind seems to possess a protective membrane that can either repel or let in other dreaming minds, depending on how we think and feel about them: how we react to their unique identity markers. Even when we willingly seek to lucid dream share with others, the soul/ cell mistrust of ‘not self’ comes into play in the form of barriers that have to be overcome. And sometimes these barriers cannot be breached. Our soul’s mysterious immune system at work? And yet it could also have something to do with the nature of the dream space itself.
A lucid dreamer friend of mine, Sean Dabbs, has had many successful dream shares with his young daughter, but one night he encountered a barrier:
“(Lucid) I am determined to get to the tree, so I go back under and head to the tree. AGAIN. As I reach the tree I realize that my daughter is not there, she has not been here for any of these times, I just know it. But, even if she is not here, why can’t I still not get to the tree? I start to faze out, NO! I grip the dream by rubbing my hands together. I stay in the black void for a few seconds but cannot help it and wake.
As I wake up I think about why it is I cannot go to the tree. Over the last few weeks she has been adding new additions to the tree and I have been contributing less and less. I think the tree has now completely gone over to her dream space, and it is only around, or accessible, when she visits it. When I talk to her she confirms what I already suspected: she could not go to the tree that night! It’s as if she is the ‘host’ , like how a website needs to be hosted by a source computer.’
As within, so without. Our bodies reside in a house with a specific structure, design, furnishings, window views (perspectives) doors (entrances and exits), etc. Fashioned by our imagination, constructed from the substance of our thoughts and feelings, our individual dream spaces may possess similar characteristics to a house designed by an architect and built up of various materials. We all personalize our physical homes and in the same vein each of our dream spaces is an expression of our unique energy/identity. Sean and his daughter share both a physical home and a dream tree where they have met in shared lucid dreams, but the tree appears to exist primarily in his daughter’s soul space which he enters with her permission.
In dreams our mind touches upon other minds, and where our unique selves intersect takes the form of and is furnished with projections/expressions of our being/feelings in wondrously creative ways. Everyone knows dreams can be highly symbolic, but that does not mean they are not real worlds with real laws. I have come to believe there is no such thing as objective reality. As Robert Lanza puts it in his book Biocentrism, ‘No dead universe ever existed outside of Mind. ‘Nothingness‘ is a meaningless concept… the universe is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the Self’ a creative expression of consciousness just like our dreams.
An excerpt from another lucid dream share Sean had with his daughter:
‘…Suddenly he (my Guide) was inexplicably inside a painting, dressed as a pirate with long black hair, a black beard and a deep red pirate hat and coat. ‘I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth!’ he shouts at me from within the painting. Okay, well, I do not have time for this. Next to me is someone… how long have they been here? I take their hand. It is my daughter. She leads me through a portal to the tree house and excitedly pulls me around, showing me what she has been doing to it. ‘Come this way, Daddy,’ she tells me and takes me through a narrow passage with square hedges…
The next day I was talking to my daughter about my strange encounter with my dream guide and him turning into a pirate in a painting, and she told me she had read a school book last year about a pirate in a painting that would come out of the painting to chase the kids in the book. When I asked her what the pirate looked like she said he had ‘a black beard and hair and a red hat and outfit.’ It seems she was projecting her thoughts into my dream before grabbing me and pulling me into her dream!
Very strange but fits perfectly with what I have already experienced with shared dreaming. For example, when I went into X’s dream space I saw something of mine on a shelf of her house! We are always projecting, not just ourselves but all of our other baggage as well!’
According to quantum physics, space-time is an illusion. What is real are the particles and the connections between the particles. Particles that have more connections are deemed to be closer and ones with less connections are farther away.
Dreaming minds seem to behave like quantum particles, and the more connections we have with someone, the closer they are, the easier they are to find and interact with in the dream space. It is also possible to establish a connection between two or more dreaming minds simply through strong intent. The point is that space-time really does not seem to exist in dreams.
Recent experiences have taught me it is increasingly common to ‘run into’ a real person in a lucid dream even before meeting them in waking reality. At first I was tempted to think this implied we were destined to become friends, but I discovered that is not necessarily the case. In the virtual space of the internet people mingle and meet like cells in the body and our selves in the dream space.
More and more I interact with people online I have never met in the flesh, and this ease of meeting and communicating seems increasingly reflected in my dreams. And vice versa? In the last three months, I have met three different people in a dream before virtually meeting them in waking reality. Our individual mind is interconnected with other minds like cells in a single conscious awareness, which the intelligence of my heart tells me is forever dreaming Itself into existence.
Lucid Dream of January 9, 2014:
… A hostile female was outside my front door. I tried to keep her out but she somehow forced herself inside and cornered me. A small group of people who also lived in my house quickly gathered round. One or two of them began partially opening and shutting the door, making a reverberating banging sound. I encouraged them because I saw this action disturbed and weakened the woman threatening me… In this same home, my husband made me aware of our dog’s plight. I saw with horror that on his back sat a huge, fat, slightly elongated, hairy-sided creature latched onto the back of a similar organism clinging to my dog’s spine and draining him of health and life.
My husband helped me remove the pair of ‘leeches.’ I then began pulling long, slender, solid-liquid tubes out of my dog, one by one, ignoring my disgust at the slimy texture as I drew them all out completely until none remained. My dog, now a small human child, sat up and let me know he was okay now, except for a little discomfort, which was not surprising considering what he had just been through. I made sure my husband threw both of the strange creature-things out of the house so they could not attack anyone again.
‘…When an immune scavenger cell receives a tug—let‘s say, a message of bacterial invasion—it responds instantly. Elongating its usual spherical shape, it moves deliberately toward its prey. Upon meeting the invader, the cell attaches to it with sticky proteins, changing shape again to wrap around the intruder to eliminate it. This response requires the membrane receptors to recognize danger (that is, ‘not self’) and attach, while the fabric inside the cell responds and coordinates the cell‘s activities.’ – Sondra Barrett
Could this lucid dream have been a symbolic pageant depicting the activity of my cells? I have had cellular biology, and its mysterious relationship to dreaming, much on my mind, so perhaps the dream space staged this performance. When I woke, the creature-thing attached to the other creature-thing on my dog reminded me of photos of human cells magnified countless times.
I adore my dog, and in the dream he may have represented my animal-physical nature. I appear to have witnessed an immune cell latch onto an unhealthy dangerous cell, which I then eliminated from my house, a symbol of my body and self. Could the long, flexible, solid yet also liquid-like strings I pulled out of my dog be the sticky proteins produced by the immune cell? They filled several ‘channels’ in my dog’s body and as I pulled them out they seemed to purify these channels like a pipe cleaner. In the dream I knew this action was instrumental in healing him.
The hostile female at the door may have represented an invading bacteria. The manner in which other residents immediately gathered around this energetic intruder (her feminine nature indicative perhaps of her ability to reproduce) reflects the body’s immune response. The door quickly opening and closing makes me think of the valves of my heart, through which blood began flowing more quickly in response to my immune system going into high alert. The banging sound and vibration that so disturbed the intruder is also interesting in light of how cells work.
‘Within our cellular scaffolding is where humming, drumming, light, movement, ‘vibes,’ and thoughts shift mind, body, and spirit… The fabric of the cell (cytoskeleton) gives it a pliable structure, along with the ability to coordinate information, choice, and movement… It is the ‘shape changer’ and energy transformer. Our cells change shape, move, grow, and ‘choose’ what to do… They manage us through tensing and releasing tension.’ – Sondra Barrett
As we sleep and dream we are constantly, amongst other things, responding to, and ideally resolving, emotional, mental and physical issues. This may be one reason why sleep disorders are so debilitating, and why not sleeping at all would kill us. In dreams we are all of us confronted, often in amazingly dramatized ways, with thoughts, feelings and situations we may be avoiding, or are unaware of, in waking reality. Dreams immerse us in any mental, emotional and spiritual tensions we may be suffering from, and help us release them by way of understanding, which affects our health for the better.
‘When we are stressed, our cells take in less oxygen, and when that happens they can make only about onetenth the amount of energy as when we are breathing deeply and relaxed… Tension, be it physical or mental, is a major factor in unnecessary energy loss… Stress: One definition is any situation that we perceive we don‘t have the resources to handle.’ – Sondra Barrett
Dream work is an incredibly valuable resource for managing stress on all levels of our being. At the end of my dream, a man in my home said to the assembled company, ‘When I die, my tomb will be as empty as it is now.’ When I woke I thought—Those are words to live by, forever.
Cellular biologist, Bruce Lipton, in his seminal work The Biology of Belief, compares our cells to a television set. The antenna, satellite, cable, wire (whatever) ‘which downloads the broadcast, represents our full set of identifying receptors and the broadcast represents an environmental signal. Because of our preoccupation with the material Newtonian world, we might at first assume that the cell’s protein receptors are the “self.” That would be the equivalent of believing that the TV’s antenna is the source of the broadcast.
The cell’s receptors are not the source of its Identity but the vehicle by which the “self” is downloaded from the environment. When I fully understood this relationship I realized that my identity, my “self,” exists in the environment whether my body is here or not. Just as in the TV analogy… When my physical body dies, the broadcast is still present. My identity is a complex signature contained within the vast Information that collectively comprises the environment.’ – Bruce Lipton
My tombs will always be empty because my bodies are only vehicles, expressions of my Self. The experience of my unique identity—which genetically includes countless other individuals who have lived and come together throughout the ages—is constantly being performed in my cells, in the nucleus of which, the heart of the cell, the script of my DNA is read and expressed. In dreams, when my waking brain is darkened like a theater during the performance, I may sometimes find myself caught up in vividly entertaining ‘films’ of my cell’s activities as my Self acts and plays on a physical stage.
We all possess a subconscious backstage which greatly influences how our lives play out. I wonder if when I sleep and dream, especially lucid dream, if my inner Self somehow helps inspire and direct my cellular actors as they perform their chemically choreographed parts, bringing them into line when they deviate from their blocking, and generally supervising the enthralling production of my sensual existence.
‘Consider the possibility that an embryo in the future displays the same set of Identity receptors that I now possess. That embryo will be tuned into my ‘self.’ My identity is back but playing through a different body.’ – Bruce Lipton
Lucid Dream of July 4, 2013:
… A seamless transition to sitting lucidly outside at night at a wooden bar adjoining the rec room (my lucid dreaming space) facing a slender and still attractive old woman. She is very elegant, her silver hair falling to shoulder length behind her where it thickens in a smooth old-fashioned 1940’s style wave. We’re talking companionably, I know her very well. In fact, I recognize her as Susie S. Mayo, a woman whose life I dreamed of one night and whose grave I found when I Googled the information provided by the dream, which led me to believe she may be one of my past lives.
As we speak, the subject of the christening jewelry my mother gave me comes up. I produce, or am mysteriously handed, from the darkness to my left, a pair of little heart-shaped earrings made of a smooth yellow material; ivory, coral or jade – some such natural stone – with miniature dark crosses set in their centers. The earrings are part of a set and I give them to the woman as I am now handed a necklace, made of the same smooth natural material. I also give this to Susie, who seems familiar with the lovely jewelry.
She seems to want it, almost to need me to give it to her. And there is one more christening item I conjure from the darkness, a shirt I hand to her and which she promptly, surprising me, slips on. It is transparent except for a pearl-white border along the collar bone, and falls straight and fine over the flesh-colored shirt she is wearing underneath it. The garment fits her perfectly and makes her look, despite her age, exceptionally beautiful and elegant. She sits up straighter, smiling at me with happy pleasure and, I feel, renewed vigor.
The ethereal christening shirt makes her as beautiful as she can be, and I sense a man who loves her and who she will ‘go out’ with after we part. I declare—You look beautiful. Keep it, please, it looks ridiculous on me! I see that it has become way too small for me, almost like a doll’s shirt I can’t possibly fit into anymore. Her smile deepens and she replies—I do believe I will. Now she can go out and be as beautiful as she truly is.
When I dream of people whose lives and experience seem to be my own, am I accessing people from the past who possessed my same set of Identity receptors? Could this explain the feeling I have of being connected to these dream entities, the perception that they are me and yet also not me? And might my self, even as I type, be ‘downloading’ into and ‘broadcasting’ multiple individuals with my same identity receptors in this and/or in parallel worlds/realities?
My dreams, lucid and otherwise, make me feel this is a very real possibility. The energy information picked up by my cells’ unique identity receptors makes me who I am. In my dreams, I could be interfacing with countless other me’s who physically exist now, as well as with me’s from the past and the future. The information-energy my cells mysteriously ‘tune into’ to create and maintain a physical expression of my Self are what and who I truly am, who we all truly are.
